David and Rudy looked tall, cornering an old man wheeling his upright bass along the sidewalk.
“Well, I carry it with me all the time.”
“Oh do you?” David jeered him. “In that black case? All day long?”
“Exactly.”
“Do you hear that?” David shouted to Rudy, who was standing right next to him. “He carries it around with him wherever he goes!”
“What a loser.”
“What a geezer.”
The two of them started laughing like crazy. Other people, people who were just walking past but had heard snippets of the conversation, they started laughing too. Before anyone knew it a whole crowd had gathered around the old man and his bass, laughing, stretching from one end of the block to the other. People were laughing so hard their veins bulged against their skin. Some clutched their stomachs, thinking they were going to puke they'd never laughed this hard.
“I can play it for you if you’d like,” the old man said to them.
People stopped laughing then and looked at each other, not sure what to do. A few nodded their heads, mumbling agreement, a few shrugged, David flicked the suggestion away with his hand, but the old man took his bass from its case anyway and started playing a line.
“The guy’s actually pretty good,” Rudy said to David.
“He’s alright.”
The old man played faster, bolder now. The crowd tapped their feet. Some closed their eyes and snapped. A circle formed and a young girl started dancing inside. The people who were the most into it though bobbed their heads to the beat and screamed things like “Play old man play!” and “Yes! Yes! Go! Go!”
David plugged his ears with his hands. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
“I like it though,” Rudy said.
“C’mon.”
David dragged Rudy by the collar to the other side of the street and walked into a deli for lunch. The man was still playing by the time they got out. Even the next day when they came back to check, the man was still there, plucking away, eyes closed, humming.
Weeks went by and the old man still stood there playing. News trucks came from all over the country and narrow-eyed reporters tried to interview him but the old man wouldn’t even stop to talk. All they could do was videotape him like they were at the zoo and put it on the five o’clock news.
Our guy’s made it, Rudy wrote to David, linking him to an article that said Spielberg was making a film about the whole thing. Jewish too! His parents survived the war.
Months and years went by and no one ever saw the old man budge from his spot on the block. He never twirled his upright like the guys at the jazz clubs do. People would ask him questions, loads of them, like “What’s your favorite song to play?” or “Can you play at our wedding?” or “Will it be a boy or a girl?” Easy questions. But he never answered them. He never spoke. He just hummed like those morning birds, stood hunched over his bass, and played the damn thing like he was born to do.
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